Bible Location
Meaning: essence; being; generation · 3 cross references · Modern-day map available
Ahava was the river or river-side assembly point where Ezra gathered the returning exiles before the journey to Jerusalem. It is important because it became the place of fasting, prayer, and preparation for a vulnerable return. First appears in Ezra 8:15.1
AI summary: Ahava is one of the most important staging points in the return-from-exile story. Ezra assembles the people there, reviews who is present, calls for fasting, and commits the journey's safety to God rather than imperial escort. That makes Ahava a place of spiritual preparation as much as travel. The cross references present Ahava as a river of gathered exiles, prayerful dependence, and purposeful departure toward Jerusalem.1
Water, the river (Ezra 8:21) by the banks of which the Jewish exiles assembled under Ezra when about to return to Jerusalem from Babylon. In all probability this was one of the streams of Mesopotamia which flowed into the Euphrates somewhere in the north-west of Babylonia. It has, however, been supposed to be the name of a place (Ezra 8:15) now called Hit, on the Euphrates, east of Damascus. 3
AI-assisted summary prepared for ai-BIBLE and stored as page content, based on dictionary material, place metadata, and linked Bible cross references.
Alistair de Blacquiere-Clarkson, “ai-BIBLE Bible Names JSON Factsheet Aggregating Material from Smith’s Bible Dictionary & Hitcocks’s New and Complete Analysis of the Bible.” ai-BIBLE electronic edition, version 1.0.
M.G.Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary, ai-BIBLE electronic edition, version 1.0.
Robert Rouse, “Theographic Bible Information,” Theographic-Bible-Metadata, 2020, https://github.com/robertrouse/theographic-bible-metadata.